A Hiring Matrix for Building A-Teams

This article is inspired by the following tweet:

“To make sure we only hire A-players, every hire goes through this matrix:

• Known Candidate: Team vouches for them
• Proven Experience: Done exact job before
• Proven Industry: Worked in your sector
• Proven Problem Set: Solved your problem
• Proven Scale: Built at your size” 

  — Codie Sanchez, Founder & GP at Contrarian Thinking Capital

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We love the idea of an ideal hiring matrix. This is an exercise that every company hiring for pretty much every role should put themselves through. It’s one thing to put together an excellent hiring scorecard, but it’s also deeply helpful to spend time thinking through how a candidate will or will not live up to that score card. Finding the right person is rarely binary: either they meet all the qualifications and you want to hire them, or they have 1-99 things wrong with them, so they are automatically dismissed from the process.

Nuance matters deeply when it comes to hiring, so sketching out what sort of outcomes are possible and passable when hiring a role can help an organization set themselves up for success. It’s great to say you only want to hire A-Players, but that means you better have “A-Player” extremely well defined. This will help you figure out what really matters and what is just a nice-to-have.

I really like Codie’s five categories of talent discernment: Known Candidate, Proven Experience, Proven Industry, Proven Problem Set, and Proven Scale. These are five of the categories that Refinery uses when evaluating founders and we encourage all of our portfolio companies to use a similar set of categories when evaluating potential candidates.

For startups, I would also include: Proven Adaptability.

Known Candidate: there is nothing like working with someone already to know if you want to work with them again. And even better yet, you have a relationship with them already, so it will be easier to communicate with them when inevitable challenges arise. Plus, it’s easier to validate all of the other categories when you have first person experience with a person.

Proven Experience: we have talked about this in the past, but finding someone who knows what they are doing, especially in startups, can be hard to find and very rare, depending on the function. Defining what that experience actually means can be critical (i.e. don’t confuse sales leadership with actual ability to sell), but if you get it right, this should be a high priority.

Proven Industry: It’s good to know what is already going on within an industry. There are always learning curves when breaking into a new industry. New jargon, new relationships, new unseen forces, etc. etc. Having that baked in is a big candidate plus.

Proven Problem Set: this can be particularly tricky when it comes to startups because every startup is unique. However, when it comes to functional expertise, that should frequently have some potential for overlap and the problems they are individually solving might be spread across many different organizations. Sometimes to find this, you might have to give on Proven Industry or Proven Scale.

Proven Scale: companies of different sizes operate super differently. Whether it is because of unique market forces at their size or because of leadership gaps or any number of reasons – the scale and growth rate of a company is deeply important. This is the number one thing we value at Refinery.

Proven Adaptability: when it comes to hypergrowth startups, being adaptable is an inherent trait of all great early hypergrowth employees. Even as a company scales, the ability to change course quickly is very powerful. It can even be more powerful for a bigger organization who has to take a sudden shift because more work needs to occur for the change to actually take place. All of the rest of this can be true, but when you eventually get punched in the mouth like all startups do, you need to hire the type of person who can adapt to new circumstances.

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Stealth Job Opportunities

Reach out to Peter Schmidt, peter@refinery.com, if you’re interested in learning more about these positions or have opportunities you’d like to share.

1. Machine Learning Engineers and Go-To Market Exec

Detroit, MI

This enterprise AI backend software company is hiring two more machine learning engineers and one go-to market executive.

2. Go-To Market Leader

Midwest located

Sales enablement and customer advocacy platform that is AI native and growing very rapidly.

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Hypergrowth Job Opportunities

From a curated list of startups and opportunities from our network.

Product Manager at Loop Returns

Remote – HQ in Columbus, OH

Salary Range: $112,800 – $169,200 a year

Seek a strategic, user-focused candidates to lead roadmap development, stakeholder alignment, and discovery efforts that drive outcomes-based solutions.